It is probably unreasonable to expect one’s relatives to embrace sudden contact after so many years of silence, especially distant relatives, with whom there was little he shared. More than one had paused when he said his name, as if trying to place precisely who he was. These pauses made him feel a little like some ancient hermit coming down off a mountaintop, or a bear in the first minutes after a long winter’s hibernation.

The twenty-first name seemed only vaguely familiar. He concentrated hard, trying to put a face and then a status to the letters on the sheet in front of him. A slow picture formed in his head. His older sister who’d passed away a decade before had two sons, and this was the elder of the two. This made Ricky an uncle of little substance. He had had no contact with any niece or nephew since the sister’s funeral. He racked his brain, trying to remember more than appearance, but something about the name. Did the name on the list have a wife? A family? A career? Who was he?

Ricky shook his head. He had drawn a blank. The person he needed to contact had little more personality than a name plucked from a telephone book. He was angry with himself. That’s not right, he insisted to himself, you should remember something. He pictured his sister, fifteen years older than he, an age chasm that had made them members of the same family growing up, but revolving in far different orbits. She was the eldest; he was a child of accident, destined always to be the baby of the family. She had been a poet, graduating from a well-to-do women’s college during the Fifties, who first worked in publishing, then married successfully-a corporate attorney from Boston. Her two sons lived in New England.

Ricky looked at the name on the sheet in front of him. There was an address in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in the 413 area code.